TV Sunday: Veep’s Selina Meyer eyes presidency in Season 3

Julia Louis-Dreyfus heads cast of dazzling comedy players

“My people are people, too!” Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s presumptive presidential candidate Selina Meyer tells an attendee at a book signing in the Season 3 premiere of the fast, funny comedy Veep.

Meyer, the U.S. vice president, is pushing her autobiography, titled Some New Beginnings: Our Next American Journey. A grown man, old enough to know better, practically trembles with excitement as she signs the book for him. He asks if the title is a Star Wars reference. This isn’t a Star Wars book, she tells him, humiliated. “I call it Some New Beginnings because it’s … plural.”

HBO’s Veep returns for Season 3

And that, in a nutsack, is the kind of humour that drives one of TV’s sharpest comedies. In just its second season, Veep jumped in the polls: Ratings were up, and it won a brace of Emmys — Dreyfus for lead actress in a comedy and Tony Hale for supporting actor.

Veep opens its third season with Meyer poised to run for the presidency. Her staff is eager to jump into the campaign fray, despite an almost uncanny ability to turn lemonade into lemons. Her enemies know that the best campaign strategy is to simply sit back and wait for her team implode, which it does with an almost clocklike regularity and precision. Signals get crossed, messages are mixed, and misinterpretation and hurt feelings are the order of the day. Political comedy can be tricky to pull off, apart from the late-night faux news programs by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but Veep makes it look easy.

Part of that is thanks to the all-in cast — not just Dreyfus and Hale but a rich ensemble of players practically born to the role — and a lot of it is thanks to some deft, dazzling writing. It’s tough to top an exchange at a book signing like, “What’s your favourite word?”

“Next!”

Indeed.

Veep

Veep airs Sunday on HBO Canada

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National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile